Category: Mucking About With Things

Proof of life: Have 2.0mm-pitch pin headers, 2.0mm-to-2.54mm adapter plates, and LoRa transceivers—Will solder

  • March 2, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering
My soldering is still, gradually, improving. All four of the LoRa transceivers above have had 2.0mm-pitch pin headers attached. Two of the transceivers above are slotted into female headers on pre-made adapter plates which I purchased from an online vendor. THe other two have been soldered permanently onto bare adapter plates to which I fitted […]

Dupont crimp-on connectors marathon!

  • January 22, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things
Can you spot the little faces in this discarded, mangled length of Dupont connector reel-end? Tonight, I’m helping my better half with a work-related project. Nearly a hundred and fifty 4-AA battery holders and the same number of mini speakers need to have breadboard-friendly connectors affixed to the ends of their leads and I have […]

2018 is Coming! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  • December 24, 2017
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things
All of the little odds and ends that I kept after disassembling a laser printer toner cartridge. S. and I have returned home after having possibly our finest Christmas Eve lunch yet (chicken biryani and a mango lassi for her; palak paneer, creamy red lentil dal, and beef curry with a banana lassi for me) […]

Nightingale/Songbird: Moving your media without losing your metadata |OR| A Python script for updating content_url values in main@library.songbirdnest.com.db

  • November 21, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Progging Python
If there’s a one-step means of notifying Nightingale or Songbird that all of your media files have moved to a different location via the music players’ UIs, I didn’t see it, so I solved my problem with a short (~150-line) Python script [Python 3.6 (Windows, 64-bit)] that, with input via a few prompts, connects to […]

A buck-fifty soldering iron tip-cleaning sponge versus one that cost thirty cents

  • October 4, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The two sponges, side by side: cheap third-party sponge on the left and official Hakko-supplied sponge on the right. I’m still using the same cellulose tip-cleaning sponge included as an accessory with my Hakko FX-888D but I’ve been soldering more frequently in recent months and anticipate doing even more in the near future. When is […]

What would a fridge magnet made out of that stuff look like?

  • August 4, 2017
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The patterns for the letters I wanted to cut from the meter-square sheet of yellow astroturf. When I spotted meter-square sheets of cheap astroturf on sale and saw that it was available in bright yellow, it occurred to me that oversized letters cut out of the stuff and turned into fridge magnets might look neat. […]

Curious markings on a Bosch Sensortec BMP280 sensor: “117 YP”

  • August 2, 2017
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Handheld-magnifier view of the BMP280 barometric pressure sensor on my CCS811 sensor breakout board. A sensor breakout board which I recently purchased features a CCS811 sensor (designed to detect and quantify ambient indoor levels of VOCs) and, to supply the data needed to correct its readings, two additional sensors: a SI7021 (relative humidity and temperature) […]

When you have microscopes but a magnifying glass and camera are closer to hand [Photo]

  • June 27, 2017
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
INVENSENSE MPU-6050 [D4H592LAT EL 1539 E]: snapshot taken with a Canon G7X through a handheld 40x magnifying glass because they were good enough for my purposes and the scopes are all packed away at the moment.

Changing your default Python install: one tiny wrinkle that shouldn’t have tripped me up

  • April 18, 2017
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Python Sysadminning
So you’ve installed a later and greater version of Python (Python 3.6.1 in my case) in /usr/local/bin and would like it to be used instead of your server’s default (and presumably older) python version when you type python at the shell prompt after logging in? The solution is widely documented. Add the following to the […]

How I got Python 3.6.1 and WSGI working on CentOS 7.3

  • April 17, 2017
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HerpDerp mod_wsgi Mucking About With Things Python
I set out to get WSGI going, with Python 3.x, on my CentOS 7.3 VPS. Initially, I began by trying to follow the path laid out in a 2011 blog post (Building mod_wsgi with EasyApache for WHM/cPanel) but with current equivalents of Python and mod_wsgi. That’s a very lucidly written article and it’s apparent from […]

Purikura with props; Or, getting the hang of using a Canon SELPHY printer.

  • February 3, 2017
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter
We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]

Let’s Talk About Money!

  • February 2, 2017
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Lately, I’ve been spending chunks of my free time futzing with cheap microwave doppler radar sensors and soda-can antennas. Last night, it was all about hooking up teensy all-in-one MP3-players and itsy bitsy little OLED screens to Arduino boards. I’ll write more on that soon. Right now, let’s talk about money. Or, rather, the latest […]